WebWatch

Background

The Web is continuing to grow and develop within the UK Higher Education community. Not only are the number of services growing, but, increasingly, we are finding new technologies for developing and delivering web services are emerging. Although many of the new technologies have enthusiastic supporters, institutions (and funding bodies) may have their concerns over the implementation and support costs. Managers of web services may have concerns regarding the interworking of various technologies.

Fortunately the Web enables national (and indeed international) auditing tools to be used, which can assist in monitoring usage of emerging web technologies.

The WebWatch project will develop and use a number of monitoring tools in order to assist various communities by providing an analysis of use of Web technologies within various communities in the UK.

Objectives

The objectives of the WebWatch project are:

• To develop robot software to gather information on usage of web technologies within a number of communities within the UK.
• To use the software to collect the data.
• To develop (if appropriate) and use analysis tools to provide statistical analyses of the data.
• To produce reports explaining the analyses.
• To make recommendations to appropriate bodies on the information collected.
• To publicise reports to relevant communities.
• To make use of other tools to assist analyses in related areas, such as monitoring log files.

Communities

We would like to work with related groups on a number of levels:

• Information exchange-
  • Web research communities
  • Research councils
  • Indexing communities and related projects, e.g. appropriate European and other groups (W3C, IETF..)
  • Caching communities
  • People with special interests that we might input to (e.g. metadata)
• A knowledge base-
  • Information will be freely available
  • Surveys for various communities
    • UK HE
    • Public Libraries
• Special interest-
  • Metadata
• Web software developers

Deliverables

WebWatch will accumulate a body of material over its lifetime, this is envisaged to include:

• Periodic status reports
• Final project report
• Presentations and "mini-surveys"
• Web pages of interest to robot developers and indexers
• A set of tools for collection and analysis of Web resources

Aside from statistical summaries of data, we would like to look at producing visual representations of particular web communities.

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